


A rose by any other name

by endlesshorizons



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drug Use, Homophobia, M/M, Sherlock acts like an adult
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 04:49:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1374460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesshorizons/pseuds/endlesshorizons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At three years of age, William Sherlock Scott Holmes worships his big brother Mycroft and wants to grow up just like him. That is, until he sneaks out of the house one day and sees something he wasn't meant to see. The next morning, when Mummy slips up and chides “Billy” for playing with his cereal, he doesn’t correct her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A rose by any other name

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fanfiction - first anything over a couple hundred words, actually - that I've ever finished. It's also un-beta'ed and un-Brit-picked (by a real British person), so any constructive criticism is welcome. :) Thanks!
> 
> (And of course, the title is from Romeo and Juliet.)

At three years of age, William Sherlock Scott Holmes has a head of unruly dark curls and a predilection for pirate stories. He doesn’t get along very well with the other kids in the neighbourhood, but his big brother Mycroft says they’re all idiots, so that’s all right. Mycroft is ten, absolutely brilliant, and can get grown-ups to do anything he asks for. Mycroft even has a cool name, and little William decided just last week that he wants to be called by his much less _boring_ middle name, Sherlock.

It’s a Thursday afternoon when William sneaks out to the primary school to see the big kids, flying through the neighbourhood streets he has already memorized and ducking behind the fences of the schoolyard. He really shouldn’t be here; Mummy had promised to take him to the park this afternoon, but just as they were getting ready to leave the house, a phone call came in from one of Mummy’s old friends at the university. Mummy sat William back down at the kitchen table with the children’s encyclopedia and told him to stay put for just a few minutes. But William has never stayed put in his short life, so when Mummy wandered into the next room for a few moments, he snuck out the unlocked front door.

Now he’s here at the school, watching as a boy who looks barely older than William himself get cornered into an out-of-the-way crevice of the school building by three much bigger kids. Mycroft walks by then, and William waits excitedly for Mycroft to step in and tell the bullies to leave the boy alone, like he had that time William had unthinkingly revealed that Mikey Baker down the street had wet his pants.

Mycroft, however, simply looks away from the boys huddled in the corner and walks on. Later that evening, William asks Mycroft about this and Mycroft turns to him and arranges himself in that particular way meaning that he was about to impart an important lesson. Except this time, Mycroft says, “It won’t have mattered in the end anyway. They would have picked on him again in a few weeks, but now they will associate me with him. Be careful who you associate yourself with, Sherlock.”

William doesn’t understand much about associating with people, and he wonders if Mycroft would associate with _him_ if they weren’t brothers. William thinks long and hard about this, little eyebrows furrowing in concentration. The next morning, when Mummy slips up and chides “Billy” for playing with his cereal, he doesn’t correct her.

\--

Billy is seven years old when the family dog is put down. Mycroft and their parents tell him that Redbeard was sent to live with their Great-Aunt Lisa in the country, but Derek James who sits beside Billy in maths tells him that this means Redbeard is gone. Later during break, Derek sits down next to Billy at his lonely cafeteria table and offers him a sweet.

\--

In sixth form, Will sits at a table in the back of the school library during lunch, textbooks and notes strewn haphazardly across his side of the table and on the floor. Across from him sits Lulu Lim, who is jeered at when she speaks because of her accent, and Jason Phillips, who is painfully shy and never seems to know what to do with his arms.

Will, Lou and Jason don’t like the cafeteria during lunch, choosing to camp out in their own cosy sanctuary instead. Will constantly attracts the librarians’ ire with the spatter of his personal belongings and his random outbursts of realization, at which point Lou will invariably pick up the nearest object and aim it at his head. Lou doesn’t really mind though, because last year, when Chris Lancaster had driven Lou to a parking lot after the movie and shoved her down into the backseat, Will had shown up and thrown the car door open like a vengeful god out for blood. He had somehow deduced from two missed calls and the configuration of grass on the side of Lou’s driveway the who, what and where of the situation, barged in with a furious, glowing glare and nearly crushed Chris’ ribs.

“Wrong,” he says now, knocking against her foot under the table without looking up from where his nose is buried in a textbook.

“You don’t even know what I’m writing,” Lou glares, pausing in her scribbling.

“You just wrote that the daughter cells after meiosis I are diploid. Even an idiot knows they’re haploid.”

Lou waits until Will is sipping from his water bottle to kick him hard in the shins. She and Jason laugh at the sight of the arrogant tosser sputtering, until the on-duty librarian marches over yet again to tell them to be quiet.

\--

Will and Lou end up going to university together, but Lou’s dormitory is on the other side of campus and he never sees her most days because she’s decided to go into political science (why do they even bother calling it a science?). His floormates are dull and concerned with the most frivolous of things, and Will has never had a problem with saying exactly what he is thinking. Lou, meanwhile, has found a group of friends who don’t care what she sounds like when she speaks, as long as what she says is clever and funny. They invite him to parties and knock raucously on his door when they head out on weekends, but their conversation is littered with inside jokes and Will gets tired of being a charity case. The next time Lou calls him up, he tells her that he has already made plans for the weekend and he can hear how pleased she is from the other side of the telephone line.

Will shuts himself up with his experiments, and most of the time, that’s just fine with him. A few weeks in, Mycroft drops by unannounced and tells Will that he’s welcome to call anytime, and there are a couple of people he would like him to meet. Will scowls, picks up his violin and screeches out the squeakiest notes he can until Mycroft sighs and leaves.

\--

The following semester, Will meets Victor Trevor. He is walking down the footpath in a grassy area of campus when barking jolts him out of his reverie. The Irish setter bounding towards him looks so much like Redbeard that for a second, all he can do is stare. That is, until the dog latches itself to Will’s ankle and refuses to let go. His human follows quickly after, prying his pet away from Will and apologising profusely.

Somehow, despite Will’s bruised ankle – or perhaps because of it – they become fast friends. When Will makes an inappropriate deduction or conducts an unsettling experiment, Victor neither rolls his eyes nor makes a sarcastic comment. Will has never known anyone to simply smile fondly at his admittedly ridiculous behaviour and carry on. It is fascinating and Will is more than a little bit intrigued by the way that Victor seems genuinely to be undisturbed by anything, or the way that his face lights up at the littlest things. Will takes to keeping a mental catalogue of all of Victor’s smiles and tones of voice and the ways light reflects off his eyes. Later, he will also get to know every mark and crevice on his skin, and be able to discern every sound Victor makes when they are huddled together under the covers of Will’s tiny single bed.

Mycroft deduces this dalliance the moment Will steps into their parents’ house after the end of his first year. He resolutely ignores both Mycroft’s disapproval and their parents’ eager questions, but consents to bringing Victor home for dinner the following Friday.

\--

Victor’s father is a chemistry professor at the university, and Will somehow finds himself in one of Dr. Trevor’s lectures the next winter. Dr. Trevor seems to be delighted with Will’s interjections, which anyone else would have deemed rude, and when Will finishes his work early in a laboratory session and begins taking advantage of the equipment for one of his personal experiments, the professor just smiles and asks Will to explain his methodology. None of this helps, however, when Dr. Trevor comes home early from a conference one afternoon two years later and finds Will and Victor pressed together on the sofa. The yelling starts then, and doesn’t end when Will is unceremoniously kicked out of the Trevor house and told to never come back.

Victor tells Will that his parents have given him an ultimatum: break things off, or be disowned from the family. The look on Victor’s face is one which Will, with all his careful observations, has never seen before and he doesn’t know how to make it go away. It will be years before he understands that there is nothing he could have done. Will doesn’t think of himself as idealistic and doesn’t imagine he is living in a fairy tale, but a part of him had still hoped. He watches Victor’s mouth move as he speaks, imagining that it is forming a different set of words; when Victor quietly shuts the door to Will’s flat, he pretends that he is shutting the two of them in and away from whatever lays beyond that door, rather than taking his bags and packing up everything but a shadow of himself to haunt the halls of the too-silent flat.

Things go from bad to worse a few days later, when Will discovers that the professor who had agreed to take him on as a graduate student had rescinded the already-confirmed offer. All the filed paperwork seems to have mysteriously disappeared and when he barges into the professor’s office to demand an explanation, all he receives is a disgusted dismissal and a threat for security to be called. In the end, security does prove to be necessary and when Will complains to the registrar’s office, the secretary only looks at him and says, “You should have been more careful.”

That night, Will walks through a darkened alley on his way back to his flat and finds a group of inebriated, obnoxious young men huddled by the landing of a fire escape. Someone yells at him, and Will vaguely recognizes Seb Wilkes, a commerce student who had been on his floor in residence and had taken special care in spreading barbed comments about him throughout the dormitory. In a fit of vindictiveness, instead of simply walking on as he normally would, Will snarls at the group of young men and singles out cheaters and thieves and depressed addicts from broken homes. Unsurprisingly, they turn on him, shove him against the pavement and throw kicks and punches at him until he forgets everything else. Surprisingly, they then invite him back to one of their flats and offers him bandages and tea and an impressive array of illegal substances.

\--

This is how Will comes to be acquainted with the second love of his life – heroin. And once he discovers it, he can’t seem to get enough. All his life, he has been saddled with a brain that is too large for his head. Too many emotions, too many thoughts, and they have all been trapped in that little ball of bone and protein and fat. But when the drug is coursing through his veins, it’s like his entire skull expands, it swells and widens and, like a firework, rushes into the space around it. Suddenly, he is part of the world, and everything around him is a little bit brighter, a little bit more colourful, and it is glorious. It is beautiful and dazzling and Will, who has always known what it was to be happy, now knows what it is to be _content_ , to be absolutely at peace with the world around him. He sits alone in his flat at the dead of night and fills his syringe, and he can’t remember a time when his life has made more sense.

\--

Will barely passes his finals, scraping by to receive his degree riding on his impeccable scores from previous semesters. It barely matters to him, anyway, because he is quickly forgetting that the world exists outside of his head. When he walks down the street, he looks at the coffee stains on the coats of unsuspecting passersby and instead of thinking _drunkard_ and _closeted cross-dresser_ and _unhappy marriage_ , he is fascinated by the patterns the dark brown liquid forms on the fabric, the way the intensity of the colours change and vary according to how deeply the fluid has soaked through, and he can only describe it as poetic.

Will has always known that the way his mind works is atypical; he has defined himself by it and preened from the praise and been devastated by the contempt, but he has never seen it as anything other than a meter against which to measure himself. Now, he feels the gears of his brain turning and he can only marvel at the intricacy of it, the perfect way the spokes fit together. He starts to believe that maybe he is beautiful after all, even if no one is there to say it.

Other people’s words and glances slide right off him, no longer being absorbed into the deepest parts of him to be bottled up and regurgitated at the most unsuspecting of times. He sees others caught up with their earthly concerns, and all he wants to do is _laugh_ , because – oh, how cute of them! How do they not know that none of this is important? Nothing in the world is, really, because everything around us, everything from the buildings and bridges to television programmes to money – oh, those little sheets of paper that everyone thinks is worth something! – everything is simply a construction made up by people who think they are better than others, who dare to impose their own deluded beliefs on the world around them.

So when the rent runs out and the power is turned off and the dealers come knocking at his door, Will tells them to give him a few more days, and then promptly forgets about it. This isn’t like him, but by then, Will has long since forgotten what he is like. Why should he waste any thoughts on that unhappy, heartbroken young man who has nothing in store for him? He opens the leather case his uncle had brought back from Morocco years ago ( _for your rock collection, Billy – oh, and here’s another to add to it!_ ), takes out the syringe and smiles, because here, now, _everything is going to be okay_.

\--

This is how Lou finds him, when it has been two months after graduation and she has heard no word from him. She knocks and kicks at the door until it breaks even into Will’s euphoric reverie. She almost slams the door off its hinge once she hears the lock turn and when she sees Will’s constricted pupils, his disheveled appearance and the syringe still sitting on his coffee table, she yells and yells and doesn’t stop for what seems like hours. She ends up practically sitting on him to keep him under her watchful eye while she calls Mycroft and the elder Holmeses and waits for backup to arrive.

In several days time, Will finds himself in a facility hours outside of London, trapped inside blank white walls. The bedframes are cold aluminum, the little bedside table is pale, bleached wood and the bed-sheets are the frigid blue he once saw in the sky above a clear-cut, snow-covered forest when his father had taken him on a business trip to Canada. There are no colours in the room, no exquisite patterns, and his own nausea and pounding headaches make it impossible to formulate a plan to break out. There is nothing to do except endure the legion of doctors, nurses and therapists, and let his brain burn itself inside out now that it is once again confined in the prison of his skull.

Will has no idea how he survives that first week, but once the roaring fire scorching in his brain has cooled to embers and his thoughts have fitted themselves back together like a jigsaw puzzle, illuminating the picture little by little, Will is horrified with himself. He is mortified by the way he had let his grip on reality slip, and when Mycroft comes to visit, he affects petulance and buries himself under his pillow when what he really feels is embarrassment. Will swears to himself that he will never let this happen again, although a part of him will always remember the nights when the meanings of the universe revealed themselves to him and danced about him like playful sprites.

\--

Back in London, Will finds that all his bills and debts have been paid off and Mycroft has moved all his things to a new flat in a “more respectable” part of town. Will spends a day or two whinging about this, then settles down to consider what he is going to do now that he is sober and back in the city he loves. If Will had ever been tempted to believe in deities, it would be now, because just a few days later Angela McMahon, a girl he vaguely remembers from Lou’s group of uni friends, drops by for a visit.

She fidgets as Will irritably tells her to sit down, thinking that he is already being supremely sympathetic for inviting her in. “Remember that time when some girl thought Lou had stolen her grandmother’s ring and you sorted it out?”

“Yes. And how does this relate to you currently occupying space on my sofa?”

“I-I was wondering if you would look into something for me, too.” Angela says nervously. “My fiancé has been getting these letters, once every few days. He doesn’t want me to see them.”

Will rolls his eyes. “Crushing debt, most likely. Scared you will call off the wedding.”

“I snuck a look at one yesterday. They’re signed from his deceased grandfather and dated five years in the future.”

“Oh!” Will snaps to attention and listens avidly as Angela recounts her tale.

\--

Will solves Angela’s case and word spreads. Soon, he has somehow become the person to go to when you need something sorted out. First, it is more of his former fellow classmates, friends and acquaintances of those he had helped. Then the circle expands, and he finds everyone from grandmothers to established bankers to housewives sitting on the sofa in his shabby living room. Some of the cases are beyond idiotic, all cheating spouses and inheritances, but the clients pay him and Will is loathe to accept any more financial aid from Mycroft. He thinks of the disgusted look on Dr. Jacobs face when he had stormed into her office, and decides that he never needed her anyway. Besides, this is much more fun than being stuck in a laboratory slaving away on someone else’s vision; he is developing a taste for stakeouts and midnight chases, and even heroin can’t compete with the thrill when all the pieces of a complex puzzle slot perfectly into place.

Soon, Will finds the years slipping by like sand through his fingers. Boring cases, fascinating cases, cases that leave him shivering and banging on Lou’s door at three o’clock in the morning – time shifts and twists, sometimes congealing like molasses, other times speeding by like a rocket ship. Will works and continues his experiments, getting kicked out of more flats than he can count. He sneaks into the morgue at Bart’s Hospital, gets caught by the new pathologist working late, and somehow ends up analysing potential dates in exchange for body parts.

Will hears through the grapevine that Victor has gotten married to a girl that everyone agrees is just the sweetest thing, and Will doesn’t have more than a few seconds to think about it because that night, he catches his first serial killer and meets the newly-promoted Detective Inspector Lestrade.

A few days earlier, a man had come to Will with the suspicion that his wife was having an affair, having found her lying about her whereabouts on several occasions. Will had reluctantly taken the case, lamenting to himself about the dullness of cases that landed on his doorstep, but any qualms he had disappeared when he tracked her the next day. She was very skilled at covering her tracks – much more so than was expected of a typical cheating spouse, taking care to erase every evidence of her presence in the places through which she had passed. Before he finally lost track of her, Will found her appearing out of a hardware store, of all places.

Three days later, the wife has disappeared and Will finds the evidence leading him to a small house just outside of the city, only to find the property fenced off with police tape. Will ducks inside when the constable standing guard is looking the other way. He grabs a pair of disposable coveralls and quickly slips into them, knowing that it is easy to sneak in anywhere if you knew how to look like you belonged. He has examined the entire house and is edging towards the body of the elderly man still sitting in his armchair when he is finally stopped by a young policewoman.

“Who are you?” she asks, dark brown eyes narrowed.

Will doesn’t answer the question, knowing that he has little time left, and instead rattles off every piece of evidence he has accumulated linking the murder to three others that had occurred over the past year. He is reassured by the intelligent spark in the woman’s eyes and the sense of competency and efficiency practically radiating from her body language, despite the fact that she is still wearing her uniform and doesn’t look old enough to have graduated from the academy for long. Before the end of the night, he is arrested, questioned, then questioned a second time by a man with broad shoulders and prematurely greying hair. In the early hours of the morning, DI Lestrade returns to the small room and says, “I don’t know how you single-handedly did what my entire team couldn’t, but nice work.”

\--

After that, Will starts to get more than the usual clients knocking on his door. Every few weeks, Lestrade, then gradually a few other inspectors, would show up asking for a consult. New Scotland Yard doesn’t pay him, but Will more than gladly rushes to crime scene after crime scene and doesn’t always remember to hide his excitement. The puzzles are invigorating, and he finds that the high of a solved case is even more exhilarating when they end in the slap of handcuffs.

Throughout it all, the presence of Sally Donovan glowers from the edge of his vision. It has been years since Will has learned to not let every person’s opinion bother him, but whether it’s the sharp competency she displays or the familiar way that determination and defiance light up her dark eyes, somehow he can’t just ignore Sally’s suspicious glances and mutters of “freak.” So he pointedly announces it whenever she makes the least mistake, murmurs deductions about her latest in a parade of poor choices in men, and relishes the looks of hurt and shame and panic that cross her face before they are ruthlessly stamped down.

It is over two years later, after Sally has been promoted to Sergeant, that Lestrade calls him about a missing persons case. The little boy was taken seemingly from his own bedroom, and Will is surprised to learn that it was Sally who had demanded for him to be called straight away. She had been friends with the boy’s mother as a girl, and her anxiety can be seen in the shadows and lines twisting her usually proud face. The case ends with the mother’s ex-boyfriend in custody and plenty of evidence for a long sentence, but there is none of the usual satisfaction of a mystery solved. The boy is lying in a bloody puddle in the ground, his body still warm but with no rush of air streaming past his slit throat. Will stands there for a long time, unable to look away from the gruesome scene and only dimly aware of a familiar voice screaming in the background.

The next day, Will is lying on his sofa in his pyjamas when there is a knock on his door. He ignores it, knowing that he cannot take a new case today, but the knocking just comes again, growing in its insistency. With a grumble, he rolls off the sofa and opens the door to be confronted with Sally Donovan standing on his doorstep, eyes wild and hair even wilder. Will instinctively steps back, expecting a blow. She does shove at him, but it is much softer than expected and he is surprised to see a pack of cigars fall from her fingers. The tears start then, and the words that escape between her sobs are “thank you.”

\--

The day that Will meets Lou for their more-or-less biweekly coffee date, he has just been evicted from his latest flat. They  choose a window seat and sit facing each other with their drinks while Will’s eyes scan Lou from head to toe.

“Move in with me,” he says, “Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together we ought to be able to afford it.”

“Is that it?” Lou replies, “no ‘I’m sorry,’ no ‘you’ll find someone better?’”

Will snorts. “How long have you known me? Did you really expect that?” When Lou shakes her head exasperatedly but fondly, he continues, “Besides, you’re not sorry about it, so why should I be? You’ve been subconsciously wanting an out for ages. I should congratulate you instead.”

Lou laughs, only half bitterly, and raises her cup in a toast. “You’re a right bastard, you know that? And I wouldn’t live with you if your flat was the last one in London.”

“Figured you would say that, but I thought I would ask anyway.”

“Ask that girl from the morgue. She’s probably desensitized to severed body parts by now.”

“Unfortunately, Molly is very happy with her current flat,” Will replies, but it gives him an idea.

\--

When Mike Stamford walks into the chemistry lab with another man trailing closely behind, Will reminds himself to send Lou a box of those gourmet chocolates she loves but feels too guilty to buy. The man is not only a doctor, but also ex-military – with a psychosomatic limp! His eyes are blue and hide a glint within their depths that makes Will think of sleepless nights and fireworks. But Will ignores that part, and thinks about the benefits of a flatmate who won’t faint at brains in the meat drawer and is used to a life that is a little bit more and a little bit less than ordinary. It isn’t a difficult decision to reach inside his head and turn on the charm he knows he possesses if he puts in the effort. He isn’t surprised when the man shows up the next day at 221 Baker Street at promptly seven o’clock, or when he eagerly rushes out the door to chase after a serial killer the moment Will makes the suggestion.

At dinner at Angelo’s, John asks Will if he has a girlfriend and he says, “not my area.” He asks if he has a boyfriend and Will says, “I know it’s fine” and “no.” They look at each other for a few seconds and neither says anything more.

And nothing more is said on the topic until several months later, after Will has ruined John’s third date with Sarah – for the third time.

“What’s the matter with you?” John yells. “You’re an arsehole but not usually _this_ much of an arsehole! Why do you have to be such a jealous bastard?” Then, his brain suddenly catches up to what he is saying and his eyes widen. When Will sees realization and shock replaced by dilated pupils and a quickening pulse beating on John’s neck, he leans in and pushes John back against the nearest wall.

\--

Much later, after Will walks into a swimming pool with John’s lips forming Moriarty’s words and the threat of Semtex jackets and unseen snipers, after the little red dots suddenly disappear except for one aimed at Moriarty’s head, after police officers and Mycroft’s agents storm the building (Will had a _plan_ , dammit, and John Watson was never supposed to be part of it) – much later, Will finds himself huddling under the covers with John in their bedroom, his nose buried in John’s soft blonde hair and his arms clamped tightly enough around him to hurt, but John doesn’t complain because he’s grasping just as tightly back. Someone is shivering even though it’s stifling in the closed door of the bedroom, and Will doesn’t know which one of them it is or both. All he can see behind his tightly-shut eyes is the red dot dancing over John’s chest and he searches desperately for something to say to drown out the memory of John’s uneven, breathless gasps.

“Did you know,” he begins, then clears his throat because his voice doesn’t seem to be coming out right. “Did you know that I once thought Mycroft was the most amazing being to walk the earth?”

John lets out a quick rush of breath that could just be a laugh. “No, no I didn’t. What happened?”

“I realized he’s fat git.”

“You know, ‘fat’ isn’t really an insult, and he isn’t actually fat.”

“He used to be, and it’s an insult because he thinks it’s one.” Will replies, “Anyway, I used to worship the ground he walked on.” He hears an amused noise coming from the vicinity of his chest. “I even decided to have people call me Sherlock, because it’s an unusual name just like his.”

“Sherlock Holmes.” John definitely is laughing this time, even though it’s still a touch more hesitant than usual. “What a ridiculous name.”

“Yes,” Will smiles, finally feeling the shaking subside and some resemblance of peace seeping through. “It certainly is.”


End file.
